The state's case against disgraced big-shot lawyer Alex Murdaugh is looking messy after his defense team pulled up with some major receipts in Colleton County on Tuesday. In three new motions, Murdaugh's lawyers are putting the state's police work on blast, showing that investigators basically ignored a massive piece of DNA evidence that didn't fit their narrative. Now, they are demanding the state let a private lab step in, while trying to move the trial far away from the local court system his family ran for a century.

Here’s the realest part of the filing: the defense is pointing straight to a DNA sample taken from under Maggie Murdaugh’s left-hand fingernails, labeled SLED Item No. 70. The South Carolina Law Enforcement Division (SLED) ran the tests and found out the DNA belonged to an "unknown and unrelated male." But instead of doing their job and hunting down who this mystery man was, SLED just stopped. The defense put it plain and simple: "No further analysis was attempted" by the state.

Since the state investigators decided to take a nap on that lead, Murdaugh's defense team, led by Dick Harpootlian, contacted Othram Inc. That’s the high-tech forensic genealogy company that got famous for cracking the Bryan Kohberger case up in Idaho. Othram told them they can do a deep dive on this unknown male DNA, but it’s going to take time and a rush order. The defense is telling the judge to hand over the sample to Othram, and they aren’t even asking the taxpayers to foot the bill—Murdaugh is offering to pay for the whole thing out of his own pocket.

Next up, the defense wants to get any future trial out of the 14th Judicial Circuit, which covers Allendale, Beaufort, Colleton, Hampton, and Jasper counties. They argue that local media has been running a non-stop, 24/7 smear campaign against Murdaugh, his family, and his old law firm for years, calling it "among the most heavily publicized criminal prosecutions in the history" of South Carolina.

And let's keep it one hundred: you can't get a fair trial in a place where your family has been the legal gatekeepers for nearly a hundred years. The Murdaugh name has been heavy in that local 14th Circuit legal system for generations, with his family prosecuting cases all over those five counties. The defense says just moving the trial to a neighboring county in the same circuit isn’t going to fix the local bias. They need to pack up and take the trial somewhere else entirely.

On top of all that, Murdaugh is currently sitting in the maximum-security McCormick Correctional Institution. His lawyers filed a third motion demanding the South Carolina Department of Corrections let him use a secure laptop behind bars. They argue it’s impossible for him to review all the massive electronic case files and prepare his defense properly under standard prison lockdown rules.